A “hidden service” website on the tor anonymous network that allows for open editing of subjects related to hidden services and activity in them. Drugs were featured on 179 hidden services, offering cannabis, mdma, stimulants, and others. These sites routinely claimed to deliver illegal products to any where in the world, accepting payments in bitcoin.

We decided to manually classify hidden services, not using automated tools. However manual classification was quite tedious as there were more than 6,000 html files to classify. However, we assumed that manual classification would be more accurate than output from any automated classifier. The tor network makes it possible for criminals to conduct illegal transactions on the dark web. The trading of prohibited drugs is one of the most common activities on the dark web , with several markets specializing in exotic drugs .

Overall, the non-english dark web was a slightly less illegal than solely the english dark web. This gap increased if the comparison took into account the share of bitcoin sites in english. Figure 3 illustrates the percentage of top ten categories of non-english content as compared to corresponding english content present on the dark web. The category forums & others contains subcategories, such as blogs, forums, social networks, anonymous postings, and imageboards. All together this category contributes to eight percent of all content. The kinds of discussions that take place in these forums needs to be explored, an area of future research.

The prices of these products vary; u.S. Citizenship documents cost us$500. Hidden wiki is operated and run at .Onion domains which are only accessed by tor or tor gateway. hidden wiki is a website that has a link to all the hidden and secret/ illegal works such as money laundering, contract killing, cyber-attacks for hire, contraband chemicals, and bomb-making.

Illegal drugs, weapons, and identity theft are offered on this platform. Child abuse, extreme human experiments, gore, and violence are available as well (sanchez-rola, et al., 2017). A prime example of criminal activity on the dark web is silk road, an online marketplace infamous for the illegal sale of drugs .